Posted
by
samzenpuson Wednesday April 25, 2012 @01:44PM
from the time-to-play dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Valve's Steam and Source Engine-based games are coming to Linux. Michael from well known site Phoronix.com has been invited to Valve's office and was able to spend a day with the developers and Gabe Newell himself. He is confirming the rumors about Linux ports from Valve, and has been able to play the games and work the developers himself. Attached in the article are pictures from Valve's offices with games running on Linux."

You realize the movie playing scenes in backwards order was an artistic way to help us experience a little of what it would be like to have no short-term memory, and not that the character actually knew the future only, right?

Unfortunately, even if every Steam user switched entirely to Linux it would still only have a few percentage points of market share. Linux users waaaay overestimate how much of an impact ths will have. Especially when the Windows version will have 1000+ more games to choose from.

You repeatedly seem to make the mistake of worrying about already-released games. The impact is going to come mainly from new titles. Who gives a shit if they port Missy Janes Magical Mystery Adventure or whatever?

No, I don't. Get back to me when EA, Activision, Ubisoft etc. provide any official plans to release their big budget titles on Linux. I won't hold my breath, though. Plus it's funny since all the Valve games being wanked over are all 'already-released games'. Most of them over 4 to 5 years old.

That is not gonna be the problem friend, the problem is there are a TON of AAA titles that use Steam PLUS some other DRM, and of course while the other will work just fine on Windows because Linux has a kernel that changes too often and doesn't allow kernel level DRM they simply won't work on Linux now or ever. So far I've seen SecurROM, TAGES, Starforce, and GFWL all used on Steam games.

You see THIS is where your line of thinking breaks down. on the one hand you're thinking that just because Valve does som

This brings up an interesting question though: Is it even possible to create Linux compatible DRM? The only way I could see it working would be if one forked the kernel and then created one with their own proprietary hooks but even that would be iffy since with GPL V2 you have to share your changes with those that receive the binary.

Personally I just don't see how it would be possible to create Linux DRM without getting bit in the ass by the GPL. I'm sure there are many companies that would LIKE a DRMed Lin

Unfortunately, even if every Steam user switched entirely to Linux it would still only have a few percentage points of market share. Linux users waaaay overestimate how much of an impact ths will have.

And? Linux can be legally had for free and the source is open to anybody that wants to hack it and rerelease changes. It pretty much exists outside of the scope of marketshare that Windows and OSX (and BeOS and DrDOS) exist in. If those OS's don't sell to more than a certain critical mass of consumers, they fail. Linux could not be used by a single person for years and then somebody could just pick it up and continue. Maybe if you spent less time bashing (your username wtf?) it you would have a more ra

Baby steps. This is just the beginning. Indy devels are all over Steam. How much extra work to make their Steam Mac ports work under Linux?
As much as I love the new direction Windows has been going in(excluding Metro), Opensource is the future. RedHat business model for everyone!

They are afraid of MS Store, locked on ARM devices and very probable to be forced later on x86 on another future Windows releases. And what if Apple make that move in the future with OS X, lock it to only use the App store. We don't know if that will happen, but it it happens Valve is dead in the water, at least Steam. This is a planed movement to use the current power they have with hardcore gamers and see if they can move them to Linux if things become bad for Valve in the future

I already play Valve games on my Linux computer using PlayOnLinux (http://www.playonlinux.com/). That's been very stable for me, but I'm hoping that a native Valve client will allow even better system performance while gaming.

I wonder if this Steam Linux client will act like PlayOnLinux and download Whitelisted Wine Clients that Steam won't flag as "cheating." I say this because I have a family member that keeps one Windows 7 machine just because he plays Left 4 Dead 2, and Steam once banned a whole sloth of Wine Users because their DLL files did not match the database Steam had.

Supposedly, Steam keeps a whitelist of known Wine DLLs to prevent this.

This is about porting Steam AND the Source engine as Native Linux applications.L4D2 is running already (that's their test target) and probably the rest of Valve developped/Source powered game will follow.

Just because Steam will now run officially on linux doesn't mean all the titles existing for windows will magically be available for linux. It only means that developers who had already ported to linux may market it as such. Same thing happened with desura for linux. And you can see how limited the Mac selection on steam is as compared to windows (I'd expect linux to be even less).

The only positive side to this is that, hopefully, companies will have a bit more of an incentive from NOW on to port to linux.

On the other hand, companies that already WERE porting to linux anyway, and in a nice non-DRM manner, will probably opt to do it via steam now instead.

I'm sure the Souce engine code is extremely portable, judging by how well they run on Mac OS X. However the games require Steam, so they port Steam.
Source and Steam are one in the same - Steam has just been extended a bit.

Just because Steam will now run officially on linux doesn't mean all the titles existing for windows will magically be available for linux.

Of course not, but there's actually several hundreds of games there already that have also Linux-binaries and with Steam coming for Linux the publishers only need to push those Linux-binaries there, too, so people will already at launch have atleast something play. Most more-popular Indie-games atleast seem to sport Linux-support, I've got a handful of such games in my library and I know for a fact that they do run well under Linux. The good thing about this all is that Steam for Linux won't be totally empty even on launch, and with a true-and-tried games delivery platform there's much more incentive for people to release Linux-binaries, too. How much it actually affects publishers and developers in the end remains to be seen, but nevertheless, the chances are now bigger than ever before.

according to the phoronix report (Michael spent a day speaking with Gabe at Valve)Left 4 Dead 2 is currently running on Linux (that's what they use to test).Other Valve developped/Source powered games will follow.And Gabe would like Valve to stimulate 3rd parties publishing on steam to port their games to Linux too.So even if porting source doesn't imply ports of games, Valve (and mroe precisely Gabe) *DO* want Linux ports of games.

ATI- quality of the proprietary drivers has increased lately. though they tend to only support the last few generation of GPUs only. (Early Radeon HD will be dropped soon).- open source drivers: they are officially supported by ATI. That's their recommandation for anything not supported in Catalyst anymore (Currently everything up to Radeon X). They are stable although not as goof performance wise for latest hardware as the Catalysts.- If you want hardware that will supported for long ATI is the thing to go

I completely agree with this. One of the big problems with Valve attempting something like the SteamBox is Steam and games being tied to the Windows and OS X platforms. Apple definitely wouldn't allow a third party to use their OS and it's questionable whether Microsoft would let someone build a console on Windows technology that would compete with the Xbox. Not to mention that even if Microsoft did, consoles generally have a negative or very thin profit margin and paying for an OEM OS licenses on top of the cost of the hardware is the last thing you'd want to do in that circumstance.

From Valve's perspective, building a game console on Linux would be highly preferable to Windows because it would leave them in full control of the software stack without any license fees. Not to mention that a set baseline of hardware would allow them to do mitigate the biggest problem facing gaming on Linux (after game availability) which is the poor and inconsistent state of 3d graphics drivers by providing guarantees for what will work to developers.

If they are truly interested in building their own game console, porting Steam (and Source) to Linux would be a good first step.

Reading the motivations, it seems we should also be thankful to microsoft for this -- part of the motivation for their devs to work on it is that linux is slowly getting better on the desktop*, but the other part is that windows is rapidly getting worse:P

* or slowly getting worse, if you use ubuntu and don't know how to install an alternative window manager; but Metro is still ahead of Unity in that respect

I can understand why Steam is such a successful platform, but I bought two games on it and got burned badly enough by them that I got rid of it.

The first pretty much killed it for me. It was a $60 AAA game that took several days to download over my DSL line, which by itself was fine. However, after waiting all that time to get it installed and playing it for exactly 1 evening, it came out with a patch that took about 48 hours to download. As soon as the patch was available, Steam locked me out of the game without warning and started downloading it. Soon after I finished downloading that patch, there was a new one that locked me out again. Steam wouldn't let me choose whether (or even when) to download a patch. I could force the download to stop, but that just kept me locked out of the game indefinitely until I restarted and completed it. In the first month I was only able to play the game two or three evenings because it pushed me up to my ISP's bandwidth cap. I explained my problem to Steam tech support, and asked for either a way to disable the lockouts or a refund so I could buy a copy of the game that I could actually play. They told me to piss off, and I told them I was done buying things on Steam.

The second was a game I'd bought first, but that I ended up playing for a while after. At some point, Steam ended up locking me out of the game with a cryptic error message. I don't recall the exact message (it's been a while), but when searching Steam forums for it, they recommended a number of things (including deleting the game and re-downloading it, re-installing Steam, etc.), but nothing worked. I would've contacted tech support, but fortunately that game had only cost $10. At that point I decided that $10 was a cheap price to pay to be able to uninstall Steam and walk away from it forever.

How long ago was that? In Steam's properties window for a game, there's an Updates tab with the choices "always keep this game up to date" and "do not automatically update this game". That option has been there for a long time.

My old Linux games take quite a bit of jamming of old libraries and LD_PRELOADs to still run. (Neverwinter Nights, Heretic II, Myth II,..)But I have old Win95/98 stuff that starts up in wine just fine.

Given the rate at which Linux changes, and how legacy compatibility is not considered a priority, I think I would rather buy copies of games for Windows and run them in wine. What would be ideal for me is some sort of "wine-certified" program so I can know that the developer went to the effort to test and QA

the article does mention they want someone with kernel module experience. looking at what the steam client does drm wise and how linux is, it makes sense because the only way it can do such things is have hooks in the kernel.

self process obfuscation to prevent cheating programs in general.network interface monitoring to prevent the packet modifying cheats.a hook into the opengl rendering stack to allow checking for aim-bots and the like.system process monitoring and inspection, can't do this as a normal use

I haven't been following this whole thing, but I assume it's going to be closed source. Much as I'd prefer it open (like everything) and am sure it will be a nightmare to get running (and keep running) in my distro of choice (gentoo) I'm cool with just the functionality for now.

I want to know how they are gonna divide the games, will the Linux guys only be able to buy from a special Linux section? The reason I ask this is the one criticism I have for Steam is on their big sales it is often difficult to see at a glance which games use ONLY Steam DRM, and there are plenty of games on steam that use TAGES, SecuROM, even GFWL ON TOP of Steam. of course since all of these require kernel hooks Linux simply won't allow none of these games will be available.

The reason I ask this is the one criticism I have for Steam is on their big sales it is often difficult to see at a glance which games use ONLY Steam DRM

Huh? It's not, really. In the game details (where the publisher, etc are displayed) for the game and even sometimes in the system requirements, it will say "Uses 3rd Party DRM" and often which form of DRM it is. Games that require you to be online (Ubisoft crap) will have an online disclaimer under the description which states this fact as well.

Some games omit this information but any time I've seen this happen it always seems to have been an oversight rather than having no intention to mention it.

Sorry I didn't make myself clear, I meant on the Steam sales, which will have a big list of games with NO warning EXCEPT if you click on the titles and then scroll down to that point. There is also no checkbox so you can tell friends and family "This user prefers only Steam" and thus will let them know not to buy me Steam+ games. I got burnt by this myself when i bought Bioshock II off one of those big lists without checking and it turned out to be tied to GFWL (A royal PITA) and then got burnt again when m

I want to know how they are gonna divide the games, will the Linux guys only be able to buy from a special Linux section? The reason I ask this is the one criticism I have for Steam is on their big sales it is often difficult to see at a glance which games use ONLY Steam DRM, and there are plenty of games on steam that use TAGES, SecuROM, even GFWL ON TOP of Steam. of course since all of these require kernel hooks Linux simply won't allow none of these games will be available.

The steam platform itself and Valve's source engine games will be available on Linux (I assume that means linux native ports), and no source engine games have DRM other than Steam, that I'm aware of. I imagine this will be like their ports for Mac in that only some titles run on mac, and I don't know how mac users can tell which titles they can play other than to read the system requirements. The nice thing is you just buy the game and it knows which version to download AND you then own it on whatever pla

I didn't see anything about this compatibility layer in the article, but I guess it would be similar to the OSX version, if the OSX version is slower than the windows version on the same hardware then likely it would be on Linux as well. As far as I could tell from the article though, they don't use wine, so if they do use some sort of compatibility layer I would assume (without knowing much about graphics programming) they probably have a wrapper to map direct3d calls to opengl in the source. In that case

Notice I got modded down for daring to ask a question instead of just blindly following groupthink? and I already know that Valve games don't have any other DRM but lets be honest, what makes Steam such a great platform is all the OTHER games you can get besides Valve games. I just looked through my game collection on Steam and other than the HL and Portal games (which is 6 out of over 30) everything I have in Steam is third party and I would assume that many here are the same way.

The reason I ask this is the one criticism I have for Steam is on their big sales it is often difficult to see at a glance which games use ONLY Steam DRM, and there are plenty of games on steam that use TAGES, SecuROM, even GFWL ON TOP of Steam.

It'd be nicer to have better indications on Steam itself about DRM status of games (in sales and out of), but there's this community maintained list if that's at all helpful: http://steamdrm.flibitijibibo.com/ [flibitijibibo.com]

You're not kidding. Slackware 9 was my introduction to Linux, and after accidentally deleting my Windows partition, it was all I had. It took 2 weeks just to figure out how to configure my DSL connection. Two of the best weeks I ever had, I might add.

Sorry, but as someone who regularly uses Windows, OSX and Linux on the desktop, I have to say it's been very aggravating the past two years especially in desktop Linux... Binary drivers are even more of a pain to get running on a recent distro than in the past both for nVidia, and AMD/ATI.. though the FLOSS drivers have had a lot of progress, none of them (for AMD/ATI or nVidia) are sufficient for gaming. Beyond this, I had issues with Intel graphics around Ubuntu 9.04 (iirc), regression issues in the dri

Unquestionably, Steam has DRM, but it is some of the least intrusive DRM out there.

I can play games offline. I can download copies of my games as many times as I want on other devices. I don't get limited activations. Steam doesn't break anything else on my box. And Steam routinely has really cheap prices.

I don't like DRM. I feel it punishes paying customers without stopping pirates. But frankly, I think Steam is worth the trade-off. The DRM doesn't get in the way, and the benefits are pretty good.

Agreed.
I used to bitch at people buying digital only assets (ITunes, I'm looking at you) as a no win situation.
Steam is all the opposite of that. They get insane rebates you'll never see in stores. They let you play offline, redownload countless times, they have automated patching of games which is worth gold, gone are the days of waiting on gamespy servers and going through hoops becasue the publishers will make you go to shady ad infested download sites with their "wait half an hour or pay for a gold memebership" crap.
They even have plus values such as notification of new video cards drivers and it can even patch it for you (opt-in)
The only thing I hate is that I can't be logged in from several computer at once on the same account, I could play a game on my pc while my gf plays one on my laptop...I guess shared accounts would be a rampant problem.
I used to hate the very idea of it...but getting top notch games for under 20$ helped me cope.

Hmm, let's compare that to the good 'ol days of just buying a game that didn't have ridiculous DRM, or at worst did a CD check:

Steam is all the opposite of that. They get insane rebates you'll never see in stores.

But not as good as buying a used copy.

They let you play offline, redownload countless times,

Almost as good as having the CD! Well, except for the bandwidth usage.

they have automated patching of games which is worth gold, gone are the days of waiting on gamespy servers and going through hoops becasue the publishers will make you go to shady ad infested download sites with their "wait half an hour or pay for a gold memebership" crap.

What?

They even have plus values such as notification of new video cards drivers and it can even patch it for you (opt-in)

A plus or a minus; I like to control what gets installed.

Really, beyond being an online store, steam mainly just gives you back a few of the things taken away from you by the DRM-freaks that invaded the games industry. Which is nice, less regressive than most DRM, but i

Except when you can't. I've had a handful of times when steam wants to connect even when I tell it to play offline. And it refuses to do anything else. It has pissed me right the hell off each time. That's DRM getting between me and what I paid for.
Steam is a pretty good distribution system. And Valve has a lot of sales which make it enticing. But as far as DRM goes, it's still too much.

I haven't RTFA, but I'm pretty sure that Valve doesn't have plans to require that everyone using Linux also has Steam installed. So you can just stick with your open-source non-commercial DRM-free game platform. You have one of those, right?

I just installed Steam under wine, and it worked. I bought HL2, and it worked. Then a terrible thing happened, and I accidentally the whole.wine directory.

Guess what happened when I reinstalled Steam again? The first time I fired it up, it popped up a little message saying that it couldn't see the installs of all the games I'd bought, and would I like it to go and download them again? Well yes, of course I would, so I clicked "OK", had a cup of tea, and boom, HL2 just plain worked, again.

This isn't like anything else I've seen of DRM. This is just plain handy.

This isn't like anything else I've seen of DRM. This is just plain handy.

It's rare, but Steam has had its share of problems. There's been the occasional authentication server outage (translating you not being able to play any games). Or, if your ISP is having issues, you can't launch games. There is an offline option, but you must already be online to enable a game for offline play.

There is an offline option, but you must already be online to enable a game for offline play.

That's incorrect. If you're disconnected from the internet, there is now a "Play Offline" button in the error dialogue when Steam says it can't connect to its services, which switches to the 30 day offline mode. If you can't see that button, completely close out steam and reopen it. You'll see it on the next connection error you see.

It was finicky for the longest time but I've never had a single problem seeing the button since.

This isn't like anything else I've seen of DRM. This is just plain handy.

Really? Are you sure you're a linux user? apt-get install game

Steam is a glorified, locked down package manager. It's a system of locks that allows you to donate money to developers, except that you must first pay a cut to Valve. I guess that's not all bad - it's no worse than paypal I'm sure.

Wow, did the mods seriously not even read the article either before modding this +5? This is completely wrong. This is how Valve enters a market. They bring over steam and their source games, so there's something in the list for the platform.

They *are* porting games too. Left 4 Dead 2 is their current target, because it's a stable code base they can play with.And what phoronix's Micheal reported from Gabe, more Steam-based are very likely to follow.So HL2, Portal, TF2 and the like will probably show at some point in time in the future.And, still according to phoronix's author, Valve is rather willing to encourage 3rd parties to port games to Linux.

Yes, Source uses scripting. [valvesoftware.com] I think you're confused between Source and most Valve games, which tend to use scripting very lightly, and usually not during gameplay. They prefer to use the game object I/O system for performance reasons.

Having said that, the AC you're referring to is 100% correct that the lion's share of porting Source games (which doesn't include Half-Life, of course) is porting Source, in particular, the stuff to do with infrastructure, packaging, and low-level I/O. The hard parts have alrea